The battle for the Americas is a battle for belief
By U.S. Army Captain Jason Church (ret.)
Real Clear Wire
China is prioritizing widespread influence over building trust. By weakening Voice of America and related networks, the United States is giving up its unique advantage—credibility—at a pivotal moment for influence in the hemisphere, when these assets are most needed and cannot be replaced by Beijing.
In January, a U.S. military operation seized Nicolás Maduro from Caracas. He now sits in a New York jail. Washington is pressing a cornered Havana—its oil lifeline from Venezuela now severed—toward talks Cuba once refused. Venezuela’s airwaves have been thrown open. Cubans are under unprecedented strain. The Western Hemisphere is more fluid than it has been in a generation. This is when a society’s story about recent events gets written: the first draft of who its friends are and what its future holds. Yet at this crucial moment, the United States has chosen to fall silent.
Over the past year, Washington dismantled the instruments built to be heard at times like this. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center, its hub for countering foreign disinformation, closed in December 2024. In March 2025, nearly the entire workforce of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, including the Voice of America, was placed on administrative leave. Funding to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks was cut. Officials also described plans to reduce VOA to roughly eighty-one positions, just a sliver of its former self. Later, a federal court found that the agency had been unlawfully run and ordered it restored. An appeals panel then stayed that order. The result is clear: America’s flagship international broadcasters have gone dark or nearly so.
This is a strategic mistake passed off as savings. The United States is in a direct contest for influence in its own hemisphere, disarming in its strongest domain: information and ideas. As Beijing invests heavily in shaping how Latin Americans see their choices, Washington forgets the key fact: China wins with volume but loses with trust. Credibility is the asset the U.S. can provide, and an authoritarian rival cannot. Transparent broadcasting is now one of the best-value national-security investments. The country is abandoning it at the worst time.
A Contested Hemisphere
For two centuries, U.S. strategy treated the Western Hemisphere as a region of assumed primacy. That assumption no longer holds. China is now the leading or second-leading trading partner of most South American economies. Its presence no longer stops at commerce. It has expanded into infrastructure, technology, and security-relevant facilities. The clearest symbol is Peru’s Port of Chancay, a roughly $1.3 billion deepwater megaport opened in November 2024. The port is majority-owned by the state-run COSCO, which holds exclusive operating rights reported to last up to sixty years. The port is outfitted with Huawei 5G, automated cranes, and biometric systems. It is one node in a widening network. In May 2025, Colombia became the latest regional state to join the Belt and Road Initiative.
Some of China’s footprint is clearly military. In Argentine Patagonia, the Espacio Lejano deep-space station is run by an entity historically tied to the People’s Liberation Army. There is minimal host-nation oversight and persistent dual-use concerns. In Cuba, analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies has identified multiple sites associated with signals intelligence. These include a large antenna array under construction near El Salao, about a hundred kilometers from the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay. An ideological layer sits atop this physical map. It is the legacy of the São Paulo Forum’s long-running Latin American left network. The competition in the Americas is economic, military, and—decisively—informational. The main contest is over how the region’s publics understand the United States, China, and the choices before them.
No country matters more to the outcome than Brazil. It is the largest nation in the Southern Hemisphere by territory, population, and economy. Brazil is the region’s indispensable swing state, and its trajectory is genuinely contested. China has been Brazil’s top trading partner since 2009. Brazilian exports to China now exceed those to the United States and the European Union combined. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has adopted a posture of strategic ambiguity. But Brazil is not lost, which is precisely why it deserves focus. Pro-American sentiment in Brazil is real, but it is organized, not diffuse. It runs strongest on the political right, with a surging evangelical movement, and across the South’s agribusiness economy. Much of the working class remains loyal to Lula’s Workers’ Party. A strategy built around this partisan, religious, and regional reality—not an imagined uniform ‘pro-U.S. public’—will appear informed and credible. The Cuban medical missions show why. Under the Mais Médicos program, Brasília paid Havana to deploy thousands of physicians to underserved communities. According to U.S. government findings and litigation, most of the money went to the Cuban state, not the doctors who earned it. This issue should draw cross-partisan concern. It is as much an exploitation-of-workers story as an anti-communist one. It shows what the region loses when it mistakes Havana’s ‘solidarity’ for charity.
Volume Without Trust
Beijing treats information as a domain of statecraft and allocates resources accordingly. Scholarly estimates put its annual external propaganda and influence spending at around $10 billion. This is many times the U.S. public diplomacy budget. In Latin America, the effort is industrial. The Spanish-language channels of CGTN, Xinhua, and “Hola China” have amassed more than 800,000 subscribers. They have published tens of thousands of videos, at times out-producing CNN, the BBC, and Deutsche Welle combined. Volume, however, is less critical than method. Beijing now shifts from simply pushing its own outlets to content-sharing agreements. These put Chinese text, photography, and video—often free—inside local newspapers and broadcasters. As Reporters Without Borders notes, China increasingly uses local media as channels instead of competing with them.
Yet the strategy has a weakness. Despite the output, Beijing’s direct-to-audience content rarely lands. Independent analysis shows most videos draw only a few hundred views. China has bought reach and placement, but not belief. That gap is the United States’ opportunity, and it carries a warning. The American advantage is credibility. The one sure way to lose it is to copy Beijing’s methods: covert placement, hidden sourcing, and messaging laundered through ostensibly independent outlets. Such tactics would trade away America’s strongest advantage just to copy its competitor’s weakest feature.
The Limits of Hollywood
Some argue that the United States does not need to fund public diplomacy because American culture, Hollywood, streaming, music, and consumer brands project its values for free. This was always only partly true, and now it misleads. A studio answers to investors and to a global box office. For over a decade, the People’s Republic of China has been the largest marginal market. The documented result, as PEN America has found, is self-censorship. Studios adjust content, casting, and dialogue to avoid upsetting Chinese regulators. Commercial entertainment can help American influence, but it cannot replace public diplomacy. It does not provide factual news to contested audiences, counter disinformation in real time, or serve markets too small, poor, or dangerous for profit. This describes information environments in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, where the stakes are highest. That is what public diplomacy is for: to fill the gap that commercial markets cannot.
A Self-Inflicted Wound
Against this backdrop, the scale of the 2025 retreat is hard to overstate. On the eve of the cuts, the Voice of America reached over 361 million people weekly. The agency’s networks together reached roughly 427 million. Unlike Beijing’s hollow output, this reach rested on credibility built over decades. Audiences, broadcast frequencies, distribution partnerships, and specialized multilingual talent do not switch on overnight. When a service stops, affiliates look elsewhere, frequencies are reassigned, and journalists with rare expertise scatter. Adversary broadcasters move in at once. This pattern is familiar from the last decade: as Russian and Chinese media expanded their audiences, Western broadcasters began to cede ground. Lost reach is slow, costly, and uncertain to rebuild.
The strongest arguments for the cuts deserve a fair hearing. Government broadcasting, proponents say, is a Cold War relic in an age of abundant information; the agency had grown bloated and hard to manage; some of its output reflected institutional bias; and fiscal discipline requires hard choices. Each contains a kernel of truth, and none justifies dismantlement. Information abundance has not produced information trustworthiness; if anything, the flood of cheap propaganda makes a trusted, attributed source more valuable, not less valuable. Management and bias problems are arguments for reform, oversight, and a vigorously enforced editorial firewall, not for unilateral disarmament. And the financial case collapses on contact with the numbers: the agency’s entire budget has hovered around one billion dollars, a figure dwarfed by a single major weapon platform and by the sums China spends on infrastructure in individual countries. Eliminating a billion-dollar instrument that reaches hundreds of millions of people to save a sum invisible in the federal budget is not prudent. It is forfeiting a high-return asset to book a trivial saving, while the principal competitor spends about ten times as much to occupy the space left behind.
Why Credibility Is the Weapon
Reframed correctly, U.S. international broadcasting and public diplomacy are not legacy programs to be trimmed but national-security instruments to be modernized and funded. The logic is one of asymmetric return: roughly a billion dollars a year fields a credible global enterprise against a competitor spending an estimated ten times that, influence at a fraction of the cost of hardware, targeting audiences that no carrier strike group can approach. The decisive asset is the credibility itself. Open, attributed, charter-bound journalism, protected by a firewall and answerable to the public, is durable precisely because it is neither secret nor coerced. That advantage vanishes the instant the United States either goes silent or stoops to manipulation, which is why the strategy must be unapologetically transparent.
The need is sharpest in the places the market will never serve. In Cuba and Nicaragua, where independent media is suppressed, and in a post-Maduro Venezuela whose airwaves have suddenly reopened, only publicly funded, censorship-resistant broadcasting will reach ordinary citizens at the speed this moment demands. The right instrument depends on the ground. Where a free press can still breathe, the goal is to strengthen it, with grants, training, and legal defense for independent journalists and fact-checkers. Where it cannot, the answer is the surrogate model that worked before: services such as Radio and Television Martí, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia acting as stand-in domestic broadcasters, giving people the uncensored news their own regimes deny them. Expecting captive local journalists, who often owe their livelihoods to the state, to do that work is to misunderstand the problem the surrogate broadcasters were created to solve.
An honest strategy also starts from a hard truth about how credibility is earned. American broadcasting is believed abroad precisely when it reports on the United States as candidly as it reports on anyone else, accepting the country’s own failures rather than airbrushing them. An open society can investigate and debate itself openly; an authoritarian competitor structurally cannot. The contrast between a country that can criticize itself in public and one that jails those who criticize it is, in the end, among the strongest arguments that the United States has.
This is not a leap of faith; it is a proven model. Throughout the Cold War, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty reached tens of millions behind the Iron Curtain, not through covert tricks, but as openly funded, fact-based broadcasting that told people what their own governments would not. The verdict came from the dissidents themselves. Václav Havel, the imprisoned playwright who became the first post-communist president of the Czech Republic, said he learned about the United States from the Voice of America and about his own country from Radio Free Europe. Asked what Radio Free Europe had meant to the triumph of the Polish democracy, Lech Wałęsa replied: “Would there be an Earth without the sun?” The broadcasts worked because everyone knew who was speaking and trusted what was said.
A Moment That Will Not Wait
These arguments would hold in any year. They are urgent in this one. With Maduro in custody and the administration declaring that it will steward Venezuela toward a “safe, proper, and judicious transition,” the United States holds decisive influence over the future of the hemisphere’s most consequential authoritarian holdout, and the shockwave has already reached Havana. The information environment in a post-authoritarian transition is quickly determined. In the first months, competing accounts harden into the story a population tells itself about what just happened and what comes next. If Washington is absent, that vacuum will not remain empty. It will be filled by the remains of the old regime, by Havana and Beijing, and by a ready-made narrative of the Yankee occupation that adversaries are already positioned to amplify. The window is now open; it will not remain open, and it cannot be reopened on command.
What Washington Should Do
The first step is to reverse the drawdown and restore the agency’s funding and staffing, consistent with the courts’ findings. But restoration is not enough. Congress should insist that the editorial firewall already written into law—the wall separating the networks’ news from their editorials—be genuinely enforced. The recurring problem has not been the editorial office, which is legally required to carry the administration’s position and label it as such; it has been news and language desks that have imported their own views into what is meant to be objective reporting. Enforcing that separation, not merely proclaiming it, is what makes the product believable.
From there, the moves follow quickly. Treat Venezuela’s transition and Cuba’s negotiations as a time-sensitive surge rather than a line item for the next budget cycle, standing up Spanish-language, digital-first programming now. Focus on the hemisphere and, in particular, on Brazil in Portuguese, proportionate to its weight. Rebuild a counter-disinformation coordinating function to succeed the shuttered Global Engagement Center, openly attributed and tightly overseen. Meet audiences where Beijing floods the zone, on short-form mobile video, podcasts, and through creator partnerships, while competing on credibility rather than raw output, and measure success by trust earned rather than impressions served. Expose the real terms of China’s footprint—the loan conditions, the sovereignty concessions, the surveillance bundled into “smart” infrastructure—rather than fabricating anything. And keep the enterprise scrupulously clean: the moment it is caught running covert influence, it hands Beijing its best argument and forfeits the very credibility on which everything else depends. The natural owners of this effort are a restored U.S. Agency for Global Media, governed by a reconstituted board with a firm editorial firewall, and the State Department’s public-diplomacy bureaus.
The contest for the Americas will be decided in part by which story the region’s publics find believable. China has heavily invested and is buying volume—placement, subscribers, infrastructure that doubles as advertising—but it is not buying trust. The United States holds the higher value asset: credibility rooted in a free press and an open society. The error of the past year is that Washington spent it dismantling the very institutions that carry this asset into the world, just as the competition grew stronger. Reversing this error is unusually cheap, unusually high-leverage, and unusually urgent. In a contest of narratives, surrendering the field is the only option the United States cannot afford to lose.
Jason Church is a retired Army Captain and Purple Heart recipient from the War in Afghanistan.